Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (54 page)

Paddy Mayne
never adjusted to peacetime and civilian life. After the war he joined a geographical expedition to the South Atlantic to survey the Falklands region, a project calling for “able-bodied men with the ability to survive in difficult conditions.” But after a month he was invalided home on account of the back injury that had been sustained while parachuting in the desert, worsened by subsequent jumps and seldom mentioned to anybody. Mayne became secretary of the Incorporated Law Society of Northern Ireland, and spent much of his time looking after his infirm mother. He drank far too much, and not happily. In an entry for the
Dictionary of National Biography,
George Jellicoe wrote, “Mayne was an unusual and complicated person…The life of this normally gentle giant of a man was also punctuated from time to time by acts of sudden, often inexplicable, violence—usually associated with an over-generous intake of alcohol.” His back pain became so acute that he could no longer play rugby, or even watch the sport as a seated spectator. He rarely spoke about his war service, and increasingly gave way to “brooding, and strange sensitivity.” On December 14, 1955, in his hometown of Newtownards, after a Masonic dinner followed by an evening of drinking and playing poker, he climbed into his red Riley sports car and headed home. He crashed into a stationary lorry at 4:00 a.m. and was found dead at the wheel with a fractured skull. The line of mourners at his military funeral, conducted by the Reverend Fraser McLuskey, was over a mile long.

After a period as an instructor at Sandhurst,
Roy Farran
joined the counterinsurgency police squads in Palestine. In May 1947, his team intercepted an unarmed Jewish schoolboy, Alexander Rubowitz, distributing anti-British propaganda for a proscribed underground organization. During the ensuing interrogation, in a deserted area outside Jerusalem, Farran allegedly killed the boy by smashing his skull with a rock. Farran fled custody twice, but was finally acquitted for lack of admissible evidence. The following year, a parcel bomb addressed to “R. Farran” was opened by his brother Rex, who was killed in the resulting explosion. Roy Farran then worked as a quarryman in Scotland, and ran unsuccessfully as a Conservative parliamentary candidate. In 1950, he emigrated to Canada, where he became a dairy farmer, founded newspapers, wrote two best-selling books about his wartime exploits, entered municipal politics, and eventually became Alberta’s solicitor general.

Brian Franks,
the commander of 2SAS, lobbied to preserve the skills of the wartime SAS after the regiment’s disbandment in 1945. He founded the SAS Regimental Association, and it was partly through his efforts that the Artists’ Rifles, a Territorial Army battalion, was redesignated as 21SAS, a combination of 1 and 2SAS. Franks commanded the unit until 1950, before going on to become colonel commandant of the regiment. He was managing director of the Hyde Park Hotel from 1959 to 1972.

Henry Druce
was awarded the Croix de Guerre with Palm for his wartime actions with the French resistance. After the war, he rejoined MI6, the British intelligence service, first in Holland and then in Indonesia. Having left government service, he worked in Anglo-Dutch plantations in Java until 1951 and then moved with his family to Canada. There he built up a shipping business in Newfoundland, and later in Quebec and the Cayman Islands, before retiring in 1981 and settling in British Columbia to collect stamps, play golf, and speculate on the stock market, where his “predilection for risk” proved rather less profitable than it had in Nazi-occupied France.

Bob Lilley
rejoined the SAS, becoming regimental sergeant major of 21SAS, and later ran a pub in Folkestone, where he would occasionally regale drinkers with the story of the time he strangled a lone Italian soldier in the middle of the desert. In special forces jargon the term a “Boblilley” is now used to describe a commando hit-and-run operation.
Alex Muirhead,
the mortar expert, became a GP and then served for eighteen years as the BBC’s chief medical officer.
Harry Poat
returned to the family tomato-farming business in Guernsey, and died in 1982 at the age of sixty-seven.
Mike Sadler
accompanied Mayne on the expedition to the Antarctic, and then joined the Foreign Office. He still lives in Cheltenham.

Pat Riley,
the American-born desert veteran, joined the Cambridge police in 1945 but found police work too sedate and volunteered as a captain with the Malayan Regiment. He worked closely with the newly formed Malayan Scouts, which became 22SAS, in operations against communist insurgents. He left the army in 1955 and became landlord of the Dolphin Hotel pub in Colchester, Essex, before joining Securicor, the security firm, where he held various senior positions until his retirement in 1980. After a period on secondment with the British Military Mission to Ethiopia,
Jim Almonds
served with the Eritrean Police Field Force and then returned to the SAS. He left the army in 1961 as a major and retired to the house in Stixwould, Lincolnshire, where he was born.
Tony Greville-Bell
became a Hollywood scriptwriter, and wrote the 1973 horror-film classic
Theatre of Blood,
starring Vincent Price and Diana Rigg. He later became a professional sculptor. His bronze of a wounded soldier being helped to safety by a comrade stands in the SAS Garden of Remembrance.

On demobilization,
Reg Seekings
returned to Cambridgeshire and took over the Rifleman’s Arms pub in Ely with his new wife, Monica, which they ran for the next nine years. They then emigrated to Rhodesia to farm tobacco. During the period of the Rhodesian Bush War in the late 1960s and 1970s, he became an inspector in the police antiterrorist unit, formed by the white minority government to fight African communist guerrillas. Seekings returned to East Anglia soon after Zimbabwean independence.

Johnny Cooper
rejoined the family wool business and, predictably enough, found it hard to settle down. In 1951, he took an extended short-service commission with 22SAS, for which he was appointed MBE. He served in the Sultan of Oman’s armed forces before being recruited by David Stirling to help resist the Egyptian-backed coup in North Yemen. In 1966, he retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel, and moved to Portugal.

After the war,
Fraser McLuskey
traveled throughout Britain visiting the families of SAS soldiers killed in action and telling relatives about the circumstances of their deaths. He helped to set up the Royal Army Chaplains’ Training Centre, before returning to Scotland as minister in Broughty Ferry and then Bearsden in Glasgow, to tend to one of the largest congregations in Scotland. He met the young American evangelist Billy Graham and began a lifelong friendship. In 1960, McLuskey moved to St. Columba’s in Knightsbridge, remaining there until his retirement in 1986. He was moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1983–84.

John Tonkin
took part in the Antarctic expedition with Mayne and Sadler and fell down a glacier, requiring a long and perilous rescue, which, as usual, he found quite funny. He traveled widely, and eventually moved to Australia, where he became a mining engineer and successful businessman.

In 1943,
Fitzroy Maclean
led Churchill’s liaison mission to Yugoslavia’s partisan leader General Tito; he described his role as “simply to find out who was killing the most Germans and suggest means by which we could help them to kill more.” Randolph Churchill was also a member of the mission, and brought in the novelist Evelyn Waugh. After the war, Maclean was promoted to the local rank of major general, and returned to the UK to take up his parliamentary seat. He served as an MP until 1959, while administering the family estate in Argyll and running a hotel on the shores of Loch Fyne. In 1949, he published his acclaimed memoir,
Eastern Approaches,
which included a description of his time in the SAS. His decorations included the Order of Kutuzov (Soviet Union), the Croix de Guerre (France), and the Order of the Partisan Star (Yugoslavia). He was also appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1944, honored with the baronetcy of Maclean of Strachur and Glensluain, and made a knight of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle. He was also, according to some, a model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond.

Bill Fraser
won no such recognition. One of the bravest soldiers in the SAS, wounded three times, he ended the war with the rank of major, and won the Military Cross with bar and the Croix de Guerre with palm. He rejoined the Gordon Highlanders, but the demons that had stalked him in the last days of the war finally seized him. He was court-martialed for drunkenness and reduced to the ranks, and appears to have left the army soon afterward. There were rumors that he had been seen sleeping rough in parks. In 1954, Paddy Mayne wrote: “Poor old Bill Fraser has collected a three-year prison sentence for breaking into 30 odd houses.” On his release, Fraser found work in a bakery and later as a costing clerk. He died in 1975.

After leading the Special Boat Service in a series of operations along the coasts of Italy and Yugoslavia,
George Jellicoe
was among the first Allied soldiers to enter German-occupied Athens. One of the longest-serving parliamentarians in the world, he was a member of the House of Lords for sixty-eight years. In 1973, he resigned as leader of the House of Lords after admitting “some casual affairs” with call girls, but went on to become chairman of the council of King’s College London, chairman of the Medical Research Council, and a trustee of the National Aids Trust. He was also president, among other institutions, of the Royal Geographical Society, the Institute of British Geographers, the Anglo-Hellenic League, the Kennet and Avon Canal Trust, the UK Crete Veterans’ Association, the British Heart Foundation, and, not least, the SAS Regimental Association.

Alan Samuel Lyle-Smythe,
the eccentric, tweed-wearing intelligence agent encountered by Malcolm Pleydell in the Jebel Mountains, became a big-game hunter in Ethiopia, founded a Shakespeare Company in Tanganyika, wrote under the pen name Alan Caillou, and finally evolved into a successful Hollywood actor. He penned fifty-two mildly saucy novels with titles such as
The Love-Hungry Girl at the “Billion Dollar” Oasis,
and appeared in numerous television series in the 1960s and 1970s, including the
Man from U.N.C.L.E
.,
Daktari,
and
The Six Million Dollar Man
. His most alarming role was in
Quark,
a short-lived 1978 science-fiction series in which he played the master of the galactic government and appeared only as a gigantic disembodied head.

Theodore Schurch, alias John Richards,
the fascist spy, was arrested in Rome in March 1945. Six months later he was tried by court-martial in London, found guilty on nine counts of treachery and one count of desertion with intent to join the enemy, and sentenced to death. David Stirling gave evidence at his trial. Schurch was hanged, by executioner Albert Pierrepoint, on January 4, 1946, at HM Prison Pentonville. He was twenty-seven. Schurch was the only British soldier executed for treachery committed during the Second World War.

Markus Lutterotti,
the German doctor who had escaped from the SAS in the desert, survived the war and returned to his country estate at Fontanasanta in the South Tyrol. With the coming of peace, his interests shifted from tropical medicine to the ethics of euthanasia, a legacy of the soldier whose suffering he had brought to an end in a desert ditch in 1942. An opponent of medically assisted suicide, he founded the ecumenical hospice movement in Germany and dedicated the rest of his life to providing palliative care for the dying. He never forgot his brief sojourn with the SAS in the desert, and the English doctor, the enemy who had befriended him. “It was a gentleman’s war in Africa,” he said.

Malcolm Pleydell
worked in a hospital on Malta until the end of 1943, when he was himself hospitalized with a gastric ulcer. While recuperating, he wrote
Born of the Desert,
the finest firsthand account of the SAS in North Africa. He returned to the UK, recovered in body but suffering from what would be diagnosed today as post-traumatic stress disorder. Ever the acute self-chronicler, Pleydell knew that the experience of desert war, so exciting at the time, had also left invisible wounds: “I felt an alien, totally out of place in this new environment…I still found myself avoiding social gatherings years after that because of the accumulation of my traumatic experiences.” He devoted the rest of his life to the National Health Service. In 1991, he wrote: “My life has come full circle. I am retired, and out of doors as much as possible [where] I can sense again the wide sweeps of desert, in which I used to commune with the universe and tell the time by the sun by day, and the stars by night.”